CLEC3B and hepatocellular carcinoma: To investigate whether CLEC3B expression is correlated to HCC development, we firstly analyzed the expression of CLEC3B in HCC (T) and peritumor samples (N) in 6 independent public datasets from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) database and TCGA-LIHC database, and proved that the mRNA levels of CLEC3B in these dataset was significantly down-regulated either (GSE14520 [32], GSE36376 [33], GSE54236 [34], GSE64041 [35], GSE25097 [36] and GSE76427 [37]), the same results as in paired and unpaired tumor and peritumor samples in TCGA-LIHC database (Fig. 1a).